Sara Imari Walker

And this invariance also implies that the speed of light could be invariant because it's a law of nature.

And then he was able to derive relativity from that and that has all kinds of radical consequences about the way that we think about space and time and the fact that time is – it's actually a relative concept.

At least simultaneity is a relative concept.

I think there's many concepts of time in physics.

But but yeah, so I think that's one.

But like quantum mechanics is another.

Like if you actually look at the observational evidence and you try to build a theory from the observational evidence, you get to like really interesting spaces that are completely different than what you thought.

And so it's easy to have theories and creative ideas.

It's actually harder to go from the observational constraints and work into a theory that's consistent with all of those.

And that's actually where most of our more radical ideas.

and foundational shifts come from.

And so that's why I'm actually particularly excited about what we're doing with assembly theory as an example because like what we're trying to do there is say if life is actually a real property of the physical world, like whatever we call life, it will have to be redefined, then we should be able to have a measurable consequence.

And the way we talk about that is actually to measure this complexity of molecules, assembly of molecules together.

which you can go in the lab and measure with standard instrumentation like a mass spec and an NMR and infrared.

Like you can measure this property of a molecule.

It's a real physical feature.

And then you can derive all kinds of weird shit from that.

And I think this has been the tradition of physics in general, but science also more broadly that, you know, the reason that we get so convinced about things and they work is because we're working backward from what we observe and measure.

And then we test it against what we can observe and measure.

And the things that happen with reality are far stranger than the things that we could dream up, which is why I love it.